


Coming Home

by plutosrose



Series: Free Coupon 'Verse [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Katara is a good friend, Relationship Problems: Mai/Zuko, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26202799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: After Zuko's coronation, he reconnects with Jin.
Relationships: Jin/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Free Coupon 'Verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1902505
Comments: 13
Kudos: 100





	Coming Home

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to Free Coupon. I think it helps to have read it first, but you don't necessarily need to.

The first few weeks as Firelord had been a dizzying array of activity. He’d been invited to the homes of countless nobles for dinner; he had to make sure that neither Sokka nor Aang happened to break any irreplaceable heirlooms while they were staying in the palace; and he had to deal with the aftermath of the war.

One hundred years and it was clear that the Fire Nation had no plans for how they were going to move on if they lost. Losing had been completely unthinkable. Now, Zuko had scores of soldiers coming home by the day, so angry that they were practically sick with it, and he had to find a way to support them and to support their families.

They weren’t necessarily bad people, even if the war had been bad.

It was often right before bed that he got a chance to look through letters or other important memos that had been written for him by his advisors. His Uncle had told him that the people of the Fire Nation needed someone to believe in, someone that was unconnected with the corruption and the violence of the past.

He just hadn’t expected there to be so much paperwork involved.

He’d been sifting through the stack of papers--most of it was on the latest rebuilding efforts in Ba Sing Se, when a letter--addressed to “Lee” fell out.

He blinked at it and turned it over in his hands. Could it have been? No, there was no way.

_Dear Zuko,_

_I visited The Jade Dragon today. The woman I’m working for lives near it. I saw your Uncle Moshi--well, I guess he isn’t really Moshi, is he?_

_He told me your real name and that I should write to you._

_I’m not sure if you’re even going to get this, but if you do, maybe write me back? I’d like to hear from you._

_Sincerely,  
Jin_

The letter was dated three weeks earlier - the Fire Nation was contributing heavily to the rebuilding effort in the Earth Kingdom, so Zuko supposed that messenger hawks may have been difficult to come by.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he murmured to the letter, holding it so tightly in his hands that it was on the verge of crumpling. Jin should have hated him the moment that he left without any explanation, and then she should have hated him even more when she found out that he’d been lying to her about who he was.

Why would she want to hear from him?

He took a deep breath and got up from his bed, wandering over to his desk. He got out a new piece of parchment and began to write.

_Dear Jin,_

_I’m glad you got a chance to visit The Jade Dragon. Uncle is a talented teamaker. I think he might be the most talented in Ba Sing Se, if not the entire Earth Kingdom._

_Please accept my deepest and humblest apologies for lying to you about who I was. If you would like, I would pay for your travel to the Fire Nation Capital so that I can apologize properly in person._

_Sincerely,  
Zuko_

-

He hadn’t told the others about Jin. In a weird way, it didn’t seem right to - his time as Lee belonged to him and no one else. The war had changed so much, had taken so much from him, and the last thing that he was going to let it do was take the first friend that he’d made away from him.

Since his coronation, he and Mai had been drifting further and further apart, and the weight of the letter - which he carried around in the pocket of his robes more often than he didn’t - didn’t exactly help. Mai was smart and could tell that his head was elsewhere.

He’d managed to hold himself together for weeks - trying to force his mind to go back to the place where it had been when he was thirteen years old, and utterly, hopelessly, desperately in love with this girl who hated sunshine and the rain.

The final straw came when Mai had not-so-subtly asked him when his friends were going to leave the palace. With his father, mother, and sister gone - the last thing that he wanted was to be alone, and the fact that she would even think to ask this question made him bristle with anger.

“They’re my friends,” he’d said sharply. “They can stay as long as they want.” Aang, Katara and Sokka, and Toph had lost so much during the war - if they wanted to stay with him for a few weeks before moving on, he wasn’t going to say no.

“They have their own lives,” Mai had said to him. Maybe she’d intended to say that to help him try and move on, help him be able to bear a life where he lived in the Firelord’s palace by himself, with only the servants to keep him company.

But at the time, he’d stormed out, thinking bitterly to himself that despite spending time in the Boiling Rock, Mai only understood about one percent of what the war had really been like for him to endure.

-

“Ow!”

Katara had insisted on sparring with him fairly regularly. In fact, since they had faced down Azula together and lived, she’d been rather insistently by his side. It was nice, he thought, to have earned her friendship.

Even if he ended up falling in the ponds on the grounds more often than not in his attempts to avoid her.

He stood up, wringing as much water out of his clothes as he could.

“You’re trying too hard to be evasive,” she said, wrinkling her nose. In that moment, it was not hard to see a world where he might have been anxiously awaiting a letter back from a Water Tribe girl he’d met in Ba Sing Se.

“So what if I am?” Zuko shrugged. “Uncle always said that we could learn something from the other nations’ benders.”

Katara scoffed and shook her head. For a moment, Zuko watched as her heavy dark brown braid shifted. “This isn’t the same thing as lightning redirection, Zuko. You’re not learning from a waterbender, you’re trying to think like one when you aren’t one.”

A turtleduck landed on his shoulder, and quacked impatiently at him when he waved it off and stepped back onto the grass.

“So, that means one thing. You’re distracted.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he shrugged. Maybe Jin had decided that she didn’t want to know him after all. That would be fine. A few more weeks, and he could stop hoping that one would arrive for him, and then he could forget entirely.

“You’ve been off since the coronation,” Katara said, squinting her eyes as she stared at him.

“I’ve been fine, really, Katara, you don’t have to worry about me,” he shrugged. Jin’s letter hadn’t come until weeks later anyway - so maybe he really had been fine before, until the letter had started to pick and scratch at the new life that he’d constructed for himself.

Or maybe he hadn’t been fine all along. Maybe he had no clue about the leader he was or the one that he was supposed to be. It would have been so much easier if his Uncle had accepted the throne, and he could have waited in the wings for his turn. He would have been fine with that. He would have learned a lot, and he would have been a great ruler.

And now? He had to set national policy and his seventeenth birthday was in three weeks.

“Yeah, well,” Katara put a hand on his shoulder and shook her head, smiling up at him. “I’m still going to worry about you anyway. It’s kind of what I do, for my friends.”

His expression softened. “Thanks.”

“If you ever want to talk Zuko, the offer’s there.”

-

That night, one of his advisors stopped by his room with a letter in his hands. “This just came for you sir, I’m sorry for disturbing you so late.”

He nodded as the man bowed low and closed the double-doors behind him.

Zuko furrowed his brow as he picked up the letter, and almost dropped it again.

_Hi Zuko,_

_I can be there in two weeks, if that’s okay?_

Judging by the date that Jin had sent the letter, she would be there in three days.

His heart clenched in his chest.

-

Three days later, there Jin was, standing in the palace’s entrance hall, her bushy brown hair swept back neatly into a tight bun, wearing a green dress with a golden sash around the middle. His breath caught for a moment, because the last time that he’d seen her - well, she didn’t look like that.

Then again, she’d always been pretty. It was him - hiding behind lies and a fake life - that had ruined their attempt at a relationship.

“So…” she mused. “This is the Firelord’s palace, huh?”

A soft smile bloomed across his face. Jin wasn’t smiling.

Instead, she was looking at him sharply, more sharply than he remembered her capable of looking.

“You lied to me.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

Her mouth was drawn into a tight line, and she let out an exasperated sigh. “When I went to the tea shop, I thought you’d be there.”

“Yeah, I…” his voice died in his throat. “I...m sure. I’m sorry.”

He couldn’t even begin to explain the way that he’d abandoned his Uncle at Lake Laogi, the way that he’d come home to a hero’s welcome that he hadn’t deserved, the way he’d become so sick with nightmares and fear that he’d made an irreversible decision about his life and who he was supposed to be.

He didn’t regret it, but it was a lot to try and explain when everything between them had been so simple before.

Jin chewed her bottom lip. “I told you everything about me. And you told me nothing true about you.”

_After they’d taken a walk together, and Jin had spent most of the time pointing out her favorite shops, she’d shown up at the tea shop, right before closing time._

_The shop’s last few customers were drifting out, and his Uncle had waved him off (‘Go spend time with the young lady,’ he’d said.)_

_He slid into the seat opposite Jin, who was already cradling a cup of tea in her hands and smiling at him._

_“So...um,” he rubbed the back of his neck. “Tell me more about yourself.”_

_“Well, we live in the outer ring,” Jin said, taking a delicate sip of her tea. “My mom and I clean houses in the upper ring, and my father - before he passed - was a soldier in the Earth Kingdom’s army.”_

_“I’m sorry,” Zuko frowned._

_“It’s okay,” she shrugged. “I don’t really remember him. He died when I was a baby. My mother raised me. We came to Ba Sing Se a few years ago after our village burned down. Fire Nation wanted the farms, but people resisted. So they just...burned them all. My mom and I left in the middle of the night. Didn’t save anything and didn’t look back.”_

_He had no right to sit there as Lee, he thought._

_He reached out and took her hands in his. His mouth was dry as he tried to find the right words._

_“I’m glad you could trust me with that.”_

“I didn’t see you for weeks, Zuko. I’m not stupid, I know that people were disappearing. Things got really bad.” Jin let out a shaky breath and folded her hands in front of her. Zuko didn’t have to guess at what Ba Sing Se had looked like once it had been conquered by Azula and the Dai Li.

“Then why did you come?”

“I don’t know,” she shook her head. “I guess...I missed him. I missed Lee. Missed waiting for his shifts to be over so we could explore the city together. Talking about everything and nothing. The way that he could just embarrass himself hopelessly - it was always kind of sweet, you know? I was hoping he would come home from the war. But he didn’t, did he? Because he never existed in the first place.”

He took a few steps forward and reached out to take her hand in his. There was a moment’s hesitation before she relaxed.

“I came home from the war,” he said gently.

Jin nodded, holding his hand close to her heart, her expression softening. “You did.”

-

Later that evening, Zuko decided to show Jin the palace’s gardens, the ones with large fire lilies that glow in the darkness.

“This is amazing,” Jin breathed, and Zuko took her hand in his.

“Do you think this time...I can be Zuko instead of Lee?” he asked, glancing over at her.

Jin smiled. “Yeah. It’s nice to meet you, Zuko.”

“Likewise.”

Maybe being Zuko didn’t have to be so hard after all.


End file.
